IME, XMPP just works. I recently setup ejabberd+Conversations.im+gajim. There's definitely baggage (the basic idea of routing messages to specific prioritized endpoints, rather than a foundational shared history), but extensions have patched that up to satisfaction. And OMEMO seems to just work.<p>This doesn't answer your direct question, but does speak to the general "health" of the project. If a project doesn't have much activity, it can be because it simply works to satisfaction rather than being abandoned.<p>There is a lot of excitement around Matrix, but having evaluated it at the same time as XMPP, I just don't get it. I wanted to like it based on the community excitement, but ended up not. Riot.im on Android is laggy and unresponsive. No feedback when trying to start a chat, then when the server finally caught up hours later, multiple rooms popped up at once. Messages are "sent" with no indication whether that actually happened, and "synchronizing" notifications randomly pop up as if I care. The eventually consistent synchronization layer seems interesting, but without being fleshed out, creates more problems than it solves.<p>I didn't bother trying a desktop client because the poor flagship phone client was a blocker. Basically the project felt right in line with the poor quality of web apps in general. Perhaps like physical goods, we've collectively forgotten how to build decent software as well, and XMPP is the best we'll have for a long while.